No one sent George Hogg to China. It was pure luck that brought him to Shanghai at such an extraordinary time. He rode his luck for eight years, surviving a medical dictionary of serious diseases, countless brushes with death and terrifying journeys over the mountains of western China on every conceivable type of transport. Young, confident and courageous, he ignored the risks he was running. But he did once confide that sliding and skidding over icy mountain roads in ancient trucks was a good deal more frightening than slipping through the Japanese lines at night.
His journalism and regular letters home are a record of a young man struggling to come to terms with the brutality of a war in which some fifteen million people lost their lives between 1937 and 1945. He witnessed repeated atrocities inflicted upon defenceless civilians. The massacres in Nanjing in 1937–38, when as many as 260,000 people died at the hands of the Japanese, were not isolated war crimes. They were an extreme example of routine tactical terror to break popular resistance to the Japanese plan to turn China into a servile client state.
Occasionally – usually when spattered with mud and blood in some bombed-out village – Hogg yearned for the dreamy world of Oxford and the comforts of the middle-class life in the home counties that he had left behind. But he never lost his enthusiasm for his work in China. In his heart he knew he would never return home.
While working as a news agency stringer Hogg found time to write a book, I See a New China. It was favourably reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although one reviewer criticised the author’s ‘adolescent tone’ in writing about the twists and turns and endless atrocities of the Sino–Japanese war.
But that was the whole point of George Hogg. He bounded out of Oxford with all the enthusiasm and naïveté that three years in a great university confers upon a self-confident young man of twenty-two. He had been brought up from childhood to think the best of people, and to do his best for them. Throughout the eight years he spent in China his letters are coloured by cheerful exuberance, a belief in the essential benevolence of humanity and a refusal to be downcast by evidence to the contrary.
He travelled light as he crisscrossed north-west China, moving from one war zone to another; but whether on foot, on horseback or on top of an ancient truck, he always found room for his typewriter. Hogg never stopped writing: letters, short stories, news stories and features. His reporting of the developing industrial co-operative movement in China, which had been initiated in 1938 to replace the country’s shattered manufacturing base, led to a job offer that was to change his life. He joined the movement as a publicity director, with the title ‘Ocean Secretary’, in 1941. The title reflected the general use of the term ‘ocean’ in Mandarin to denote anything foreign – foreigners throughout Chinese history have been known as ‘ocean devils’. This led him in 1942 to become headmaster of a co-operative training school in the remote mountain town of Shuangshipu. It was here, at the crossroads of the Tsingling mountains in north central Shanxi province, that George Hogg found his destiny.
When I travelled to China in 2007 to talk to his old boys, and to the woman he had loved and had hoped to marry, it was clear just how much the man and the moment had come together in Hogg’s headmastership. In Beijing and Xian four of his old boys spoke of the love they still felt for the man who became their adoptive father and headmaster. Looking back, they found it extraordinary that an unknown Englishman should have emerged as their saviour at a critical moment in their young lives.
Because ‘Hogg’ is not a name that is easy to pronounce in Chinese, the boys called him by a Mandarin approximation, ‘Ho Ke’ (pronounced Ho-cur). Nieh Guangchun, the eldest of Hogg’s boys, who was seventy-nine when we met, said: ‘Ho Ke was gentle, he was kind. We had had other headmasters, all Chinese, who punished us. Ho Ke didn’t do that. He was firm but he became a friend. He did everything with us. He taught us English songs, Chinese liberation songs, traditional songs; he loved singing. When we went over the mountains with him we didn’t really know why. We were too young. But we just followed him. We had never met anyone like him. We never will.’
Hogg’s work and memory were vilified during the years of the Cultural Revolution. His grave was desecrated by Red Guards, and his former students were tracked down and forced to denounce their old headmaster. But during the ‘Beijing spring’ of the late 1970s Deng Xiaoping repudiated the Cultural Revolution and personally signalled the rehabilitation of George Hogg, saying in a speech that he deserved ‘immortality as a great international fighter’. The restoration of his burial place in Shandan was accompanied by a long eulogy in the country’s leading newspaper, the People’s Daily, which echoed the tributes paid by former colleagues and pupils to his achievements. As the People’s Daily pointed out, the real memorial to George Hogg lies not in a graveyard in a remote Chinese town, but in the lives of the children he saved and in the lives of their children.
Nieh Guanghan, the fine tenor at our reunion lunch, said: ‘George saved many of our lives. I think many of us would have died one way or another if he had not taken us over the mountains. Our children, their children and future generations will be able to look back on a young Englishman and say without him we would not be here.’
So who was this Englishman who aroused so much love and admiration among boys grown to men whom he had taught in a remote town in China in the 1940s? And what had he done to be singled out by name by the man who led China out of the chaos and cruelty of the Mao era?
‘He seemed to have some inner vision of his own.’
George Hogg was born on 26 February 1915 in a large rented house in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, the youngest child of a prosperous middle-class family. His father Robert ran a well-known tailoring business, Hogg & Sons, in Hanover Square in the heart of London’s West End. George was given the middle name of Aylwin, an old family name, by which he was always known at home.
There were six children: the eldest, Gary, Barbara and Daniel, were separated by a gap of several years from Stephen, Rosemary and George – affectionately known as ‘Stake’, ‘Roke’ and ‘Hake’. They all had the advantages bestowed by class and wealth: a nanny and private education first at St George’s School in Harpenden and then, for the boys, Wadham College, Oxford. There were summer holidays in Salcombe, Devon, and winter sports breaks in Switzerland.
The Hoggs lived the life of a conventional middle-class family in the late Edwardian era. In one respect, however, they were very different. The Victorian age had bequeathed English society three overarching institutions: the monarchy, the Anglican Church, and the Empire. In this respect the Hoggs were non-conformists. The family’s political views were shaped by the Quaker pacifist philosophy which George’s mother Kathleen and his unmarried aunt, Muriel Lester, had embraced from an early age. Muriel campaigned on pacifist and anti-empire platforms all her life. She was briefly jailed in Holloway prison in London, and in Trinidad, on charges of sedition. She became a friend of Gandhi, and founded the Kingsley Hall mission which still continues its work as a community centre in East London.
Muriel Lester was very close to her sister Kathleen, and she was to have an early and powerful influence on her youngest nephew. Indeed, George’s first memory was of being taken to a beach by his mother and Aunt Muriel in the summer of 1918, when he was three, and given a sign to hold up which read ‘No More War’, while the ladies tried to impress their pacifist message upon the crowd of holidaymakers. George grew up in a family in which pacifism and international peace, very much the language of the left in the twenties, were advocated by the parents and absorbed by the children. Mealtimes in the Hogg household were serious affairs. There was always time for light-hearted family banter, but Kathleen made sure that the great issues of the day were discussed and debated. This was especially true when Aunt Muriel made one of her regular visits.
Muriel and Kathleen’s politics had been shaped by the poverty they saw in the East End of London in the last decade of Queen